A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.

Autobiografieën van vrouwen over hun jonge jaren in tsaristisch Rusland.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War - as never seen before! Packed with jaw-dropping, at times blood-curdling images, Russia Accursed! showcases the reaction of Ivan Vladmirov (1869-1947) to the human suffering and Bolshevik barbarity he observed as an artist-reporter during the years 1917-25. Some of his paintings and watercolours appeared in magazines and periodicals, including London weekly The Graphic (Vladimirov's mother was English). But other scenes - featuring point-blank executions, passers-by cutting chunks of meat from a dead horse or dogs gnawing at a human corpse - were deemed too shocking for publication and had to be secretly exported from the USSR by American relief workers. Selected from private collections, Russian museums and the Hoover Library at Stanford University, California, most of the 160 Vladimirov images in this majestic 324-page volume are published here for the first time. Placed in their historic context by scholarly essays, contemporary photographs and eye-witness quotes, they revolutionize our understanding of the beginnings of the Soviet Union.

Translated into English by Richard Seltzer, this is a compilation of two books originally published in Russian. The first, From Entotto to the River Baro, was first published in 1897 and consists of two short journals of expeditions in Ethiopia from 1896-1897, plus a series of essays which cover history, culture, beliefs, languages, government, the military and commerce. The second, With the Armies of Menelik II, is a journal of Bulatovich's second trip to Ethiopia from 1887 to 1898, during which time he served as an advisor to the army of Ras Wolde Giyorgis.'

Russian spies still at work--highest ranking defector tells how espionage against the United States redoubled under Yeltsin.

With many predicting the end of US hegemony, Russia and China's growing cooperation in a number of key strategic areas looks set to have a major impact on global power dynamics. But what lies behind this Sino-Russian rapprochement? Is it simply the result of deteriorated Russo–US and Sino–US relations or does it date back to a more fundamental alignment of interests after the Cold War? In this book Alexander Lukin answers these questions, offering a deeply informed and nuanced assessment of Russia and China’s ever-closer ties. Tracing the evolution of this partnership from the 1990s to the present day, he shows how economic and geopolitical interests drove the two countries together in spite of political and cultural differences. Key areas of cooperation and possible conflict are explored, from bilateral trade and investment to immigration and security. Ultimately, Lukin argues that China and Russia’s strategic partnership is part of a growing system of cooperation in the non-Western world, which has also seen the emergence of a new political community: Greater Eurasia. His vision of the new China–Russia rapprochement will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding this evolving partnership and the way in which it is altering the contemporary geopolitical landscape.

Tolkien Through Russian Eyes examines the sociological impact of the translation and publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's works in post-Soviet Russia. After 70 years of obligatory State atheism, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian society began actively seeking new sets of spiritual values. The Christian-like doctrine of Tolkienism has attracted a substantial following. During the Soviet era, The Lord of the Rings was a banned book, which was translated independently by a number of underground translators. The result of this is that there are numerous contemporary published translations competing with each other for the reader's attention. There are 10 translations of The Lord of the Rings; 9 translations of The Hobbit and 6 translations of The Silmarillion. Each translator has a slightly different approach to the text. Each translation has a slightly different interpretation of Tolkien. Each translator has a different story to tell. Most of the existing translations are only Tolkienesque, they are not really Tolkienian. They have been adapted to the Russian mental climate. This book relates the history of the publication of Tolkien's works; examines the philosophical distortions introduced by the competing translations, attempts to explain their origins and how they will be perceived by the Russian reader. No knowledge of Russian is necessary. Mr. Hooker's articles on Tolkien have been published in the specialist periodical press in English, in Dutch and in Russian. The results of his research have been presented at a number of conferences, both in the United States and in Holland.

For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern—and hence their own—otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism.